Last Toolbar PageRank update of 2008

In case you didn’t see where I confirmed it on Twitter, Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. It’s pretty much done now. If you want more info, I’ve answered questions about PageRank and the Google Toolbar in the past.

I predict that this will be the last toolbar PageRank update of 2008. 🙂

Looks like PageRank has been revalued like mortgage based securities. As near as I can tell, I’m down to one PR=5 page left in the world. I remember the old days when I had dozens of PR=6 pages and everybody wanted to own bank stocks. I wonder if there’s a connection -should we declare the end of the PageRank bubble?

Wasn’t bragging or complaining, just reminiscing. In fact, I noticed a couple months ago that WebMaster Tools went back to showing a little slice of blue in “High” PageRank distribution even for my newer site, something I’d requested for psychological reasons through some Google feedback channel or another, so maybe they listened:-)

Looks like i need to change whatever i am doing ie unique content, images, products… page rank has tanked from pr3 to just pr 1 tonight 🙁 ….and i was hoping to pack my real job in next year – best send that new engraving machine back to lapland.!)

Oh well just off to grab some pans and bash them together as loud as possible, yes that’s what we brits on NYE! (it is the credit crunch after all!)

Oh sweet jebus. Can I just say Matt, I totally dred it when you update us on GTPR, because I know my MD will come across this and stop looking at how much traffic/conversions G SE traffic has given to our clients and look more closely at this.

On a more positive note, I don’t see anything lower than it was as a cursory glance for our clients, so… *phew*!

Matt Listen here, I don’t know what the hell Google did to it’s algorithm, but I don’t believe the fact that my PR didn’t change after getting so many high quality backlinks from major sites. Is Google still updating the PR of blogs or is it over?

Matt, you have told me in the past that TBPR is popular with users who are NOT SEO, Webmasters or anything to do with Websites. So, why does Google ONLY update TBPR once in a while and REAL PR perpetually? Is that misleading your users?

BTW. I think you know, but I would like to see TBPR dropped altogether. It IS the sole reason for at least 10% of my spammy emails and has the SEO World obsessed with it and ruining honest businesses on the Web.

Ouch, dropped from a 4 to a 3 and I was hoping for a 5! Got close to a thousand more quality backlinks (paid for none), added hundreds of pages to my site and the ranking went down! Wish there was some reason to know why, makes no sense.

i think it is the way how dave said:
it should be dumped, since everybody tries to get a better pagerank, but it doesn’t correlate with the amount of visitors or real relevance of an entire domain.
regards
raimund

Matt, first I enjoy reading your posts… As far as page rank is concerned, as an SEO I see it as fools gold. All links are good links. Quality links with relevance is even better! I don’t waste a lot of time with PR checks, but I did download it and admit I glance at it each time I build a back link.

In all the years my site is online (dmoz listed poem site) Google bot toke my normal descriptions and titles and not the one from DMOZ. But now suddenly all my titles and descriptions are gone for my category pages. Only the index has a dmoz description and the title of the index is my website domain name. Today i added in my

Is this enough to get al my titles and descriptions back in the serps for my category pages and my index?

Is it a bug in a new algo?

Could you please respond because all my category pages are gone from the serps (i think because of this issue)

Hello Matt,
Thanks for letting us know about the PR update.
I guess the update is only exported to toolbarqueries.google.com as the other datacentes (On which I was checking the Page Rank) are down at this moment.
May be there’s another update coming soon?

I’m just wondering whether Google display the same search result for everyone (assuming that they are not logged into any Google accounts) ’cause I’ve done some searching on different comps (with different IPs of course) and the results page are slightly different too. So how likely is it for Google to display such results ?

I couldn’t be more confused. After this last PR update I’m seeing a drop in PR on sites that have held steady for a couple years at 3 or 4, seeing the ‘infamous’ gray bar with no PR on pages that at one time had a 3 or 4 PR. And absolutely no idea why. The only changes are some updates in info, added quality links (inbound). None of these sites use black hat techniques, they are just plain ol sites, optimized according to G’s rules, blah, blah, blah. Hard to know how to fix something when you don’t know the why’s.

Also, if we should just ignore PR then why does Google have it? While I don’t obsess over it, it seems like it must be an indicator of some sort or else it wouldn’t be available – so of course most of us watch it.

I saw my web site and some of my customers get from PR 4 to PR 5, but I did not notice any differences for it’s number of visits… so… I think it confirms that the PR aren’t so important to search results as before… but I’m glad, because it shows that my effort are doing good…

Update on my WordPress blog indexing problem: Turns out Godaddy.com hosting WordPress install defaulted the privacy option to “NOINDEX” all pages! Appears there is also an irregularity with 302 redirection from http://www to http:// thatI have not figured out yet.

@Matt.
Am I right in saying that the Google Toolbar PageRank tends to lag behind the true PageRank? May I also ask how frequently the PageRank is updated? I appreciate that this is an old post but it seemed the most relevant place to post.

September’s gone. Not sure whether there was any update. When is the next update expected?
When the whole world is moving towards transparency, why is Google so secretive about PR?
Today, when planning & scheduling have become the integral part of the smallest of business units, why is Google so erratic in updating PR?
Can’t the process be automated to update PR at a pre-determined schedule?
Can’t the process be made live like Alexa T(raffic)R?
Is it true that Google feels insecure regarding its authority if PR update goes live?
I’ve heard that PR gives very high weightage to incoming links. May be that’s the reason I frequently come across useless sites (often under construction) with high PR. Any plans to mend this?